Wednesday, August 15, 2018

Crisis Chronicles Press is pleased to announce the imminent publication of Steve Thomas' new book, The Strength of Flowers. Steve has been a stalwart of the Cleveland poetry scene for many years, and now, finally — this collection. It's about time!

Steve Thomas has had poems published in Baldwin Wallace University’s The Mill during the years of 1984 & 1985. Upon returning to Baldwin Wallace in 2005, The Mill published his poetry in 2005 and 2006. He also has contributed to Hessler Street Fair anthologies intermittently from 2007 to 2015, placing third in the competition in 2008. He also had some exposure in a literary magazine Muse sponsored by The Lit in 2009.

Cover Artist Danielle Stull majored in Art at Youngstown State University. Along with her painting and sculpting interests, Danielle has been tattooing, for the last decade, unique designs for customers. She is currently at Focused Tattoo in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, on Coventry.

"Christine Howey’s unique brand of conversational poetry blooms brightly in Citizen of Metropolis. Like a bee nuzzling flower after flower, I found myself buzzing from poem to poem, delighted to find tales of poems with wires showing, visitors from another world, reasons to sit, and babies in treetops. Howey asks questions we’d never think to ask, and then answers them, twinkle in her eye, with penetrating wit." —Dianne Borsenik, editor/publisher NightBallet Press, author of Age of Aquarius

Christine Howey is an actor, director, theater critic and performance poet. She was the Poet Laureate of Cleveland Heights, Ohio for 2016-2018. Her one-person stage play of poetry about her transgender journey, Exact Change, was turned into a feature film. As a play, it premiered at Cleveland Public Theatre and was an official selection of the 2015 New York International Fringe Festival. The film was an official selection of the Chagrin Documentary Film Festival in 2018. Christine has had four books of poetry published. She is also a slam poet and competed in the National Poetry Slams, in 2013 and 2017, as a member of the four-person Cleveland team. Since 2002, Christine has been the theater critic for Cleveland Scene and she also posts reviews on her blog, Rave and Pan. She has been named Best Critic in Ohio by both the Press Club of Cleveland and the Society of Professional Journalists. Christine was awarded a Creative Workforce Fellowship in 2014 from the Community Partnership for Arts and Culture, and an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council in 2016, which also granted her a 13-week residency at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA. She was honored to receive the Illumination Award as the transgender leader of the year in northeast Ohio for 2015, and the Torch Award for leadership on transgender issues from the Cleveland chapter of the Human Rights Campaign in 2017.